How do you search a bunch of word and pdf files?
 

Hello gurus, two questions please if I may be so bold!

1. I've got a couple of thousand word (.doc and .docx) and pdf files and I need to search them for key phrases. Is it possible, can it be done?

2. Also these files are currently stored as attachments to emails - is there a way of saving them all into a folder at the same time rather than downloading them one at a time? (I'm using "squirrelmail" but maybe my webhost will allow me to view those in Microsoft Outlook).

Many thanks!

MrS

Start>Search>Search for files or folders>all files> files including words or phrase...???

For the PDFs, download Adobe's iFilter, which is free. It's bundled with Adobe's own PDF products but you may not be using them to create or read PDFs.

iFilter integrates with Windows Desktop Search and Microsoft's other indexing clients. Once installed, if you're already indexing Microsoft docs, then PDFs will be automagically added to the indexes.

Re Squirrelmail, dunno.

Try searching for "bulk save email attachments" -

e.g. Save Email Attachments: Manage/Upload MS Outlook email attachments; Automatically save attachments from Outlook.

SD

1)
Have I missed something here? Word will search using 'Find' and 'Adobe Reader' has a search box on the top bar.

Adobe Reader has a "search multiple files" option, but for that to work, the files need to be in PDF form already, on disk. Ditto for the iFilter, with the files in a location that gets indexed e.g. under "(My) Documents". I don't know much about SqurrelMail itself, so let me have a look ...

Can I assume you're a SquirrelMail user, not an Administrator running a SquirrelMail server? If so, the manual makes it appear very simple when it comes to attachment handling, with no "download all" options. Your best bet might be to access the mail through another mail program, such as Outlook or Eudora, thus bypassing SquirrelMail. Your ISP must have details on how to set that up - the makers of SquirrelMail have no way of knowing those settings.

Grep for Windows
 

Us UNIX folk have been using grep since the flood, but there's hope for you poor Windows folk.

Grep for Windows

Get ready for a whole new free finding experience!

:ok:

Mac

PS: BareGREP - Bare Metal Software > BareGrep - Free grep for Windows - offer a free GUI version if you don't mind a splash-screen. JGSoft's PowerGREP - Powerful Windows GREP - is the best, but you have to pay for it...

try X1
 

I use a program called X1. Once it has indexed your hard drive it will very quickly find every document that contains the keyword or phrase you are looking for. It will also show you a preview of the document when you select it and highlight everywhere in teh document that contains the searched for word or phrase.

Grep is all well and good (Windows has find but does not have the regular expressions ) but both pdf and doc/docx are binary formats so unless you hit lucky you are unlikely to find consecutive characters of a word grouped together for it to find.

grep is only really useful on text files or at least files where you can rely on a pattern match which the two suggested formats dont.

Google Desktop
 

Couldn't live without it! Should index and search all of the docs on your PC.

Wow - thanks for the information everyone - I shall experiment and report back in due course. Maybe I should email a link to the thread to all chief pilots out there staring at a 3 foot pile of CVs!

Desktop Search
 

An alternative to Google Desktop can be Windows Desktop Search.
There is also a free tool to tag your files by author, item, time etc. and provides a web form to search by tags and content calling automatically WDS (see Tag-it and Find-it - Local Archive and its help section)